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Category: self help

  • Fear of mistakes and risks? Why? Those are the best things in life!!!

    Well, this is the final week of my gift store. Well, it’s a long story but I’ll summarize it for you.

    Two years ago I decided to quit my job because I was tired of the path I was taking and I wanted to be independent (meaning not working for somebody else). I didn’t have much money at that point and started a little business of my own: a gift store with many novelties that were not to be found anywhere in my city. I didn’t do much market research and I thought that the products I was trying to sell were so awesome that people were going to buy it without hesitation. Unfortunately, things in my country are really different from what I expected, and after 2 years of investing money in renting a place and trying to make the business grow, I came to the conclusion that it was not profitable. I was never good in accounting and finance, but I know that in the course of those 2 years I have invested a significant amount of money and I haven’t recovered not a third of it, yeah it sucks…. But I’m actually happy, I‘ll tell you later why.

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    So right now, everything is on sale at my store, and while I write this blog, I’m sitting here in my store trying to get some of the merchandise sold until this Friday – the due date for the rent contract.

    So, how do I feel? Actually pretty relieved and I can’t wait for this weekend to arrive. Maybe in some way, it has become such an economic burden, through this time, that I’m willing to let it go.

    At the same time, I’ve just started working full time as a technical writer in a Software development company, and you may think, well she has her job so she’s going to be ok. Indeed, I’m going to have a very relaxing next week, leaving my job at 5 and going to my home just to rest, because I used to run to my store after work and stay until 9 pm. I used to live in my store on weekends too, and it was really exhausting.

    The thing is that my resting plan is only for next week, because I have learnt that being an entrepreneur and being independent HAS NO PRICE!!! It’s very fulfilling, so I’m just turning my physical store into a virtual store, and I have many plans for my website and that kind of stuff… let’s see how things go.

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    The learning experience, given the fact that I’ve lost money, has been priceless and I’ve already passed the worst and from here to the future I’m pretty sure things will go up. The scariest part is when you start doing a business of your own, you take so many risks, you quit your job and you make so many mistakes along the path.  But for me,  the worst part is gone, I don’t feel scary anymore, I know the mistakes I made and what I should do to avoid them, I’ve grown a lot and I don’t fear for things to come! So if there is something good for you in this, is that mistakes and risks are part of your life, don’t be afraid of them, they only make you STRONGER!!!!

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    People have tried to cheer me up, seeing this as a failure, and I keep thinking why are they doing that? This is actually GOOD!  A NEW START! With better defined goals, better experience and NO FEAR at ALL!!!

    LESSON OF THE BLOG: Don’t give up, learn from your mistakes and rise higher!!!

  • Why waiting for weekends could be so bad?

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    So this is part two of previous blog but don’t worry this piece can be read separately.

    I was saying that I actually found the solution for stop being so passive and from escaping the routine of 9 to 5 jobs. I would dare that almost 99 % of the people who have fallen into the darkness of this routine, wait desperately for the weekends to arrive. Don’t do that! Believe or not waiting for weekends is not that great, because:

    –              It gets you in your endless routine:  work from Monday to Friday, jump on your feet on  Fridays  and hate with all your heart Mondays.

    –              Then weekend comes and it passes so fast that you really feel bad on Sunday nights.

    You keep complaining that you lack of time for doing things that will help you improve towards the accomplishment of your goals?

    You want to take courses in Accounting, astronomy or whatever it is you want to do and you don’t have time for it? You want to go to the gym, learn how to knit, learn Japanese or any other interesting activity, or maybe you just simply want to be able to spend more time with your family and do more family stuff and you find out that weekends pass so fast that you didn´t do all the things you wanted to do?

    These are the sort of stuff that usually fills our lives, we want to do so many things, from learning how to dance salsa to learning Korean… but we don’t have the time!

    Let me tell you something… time management is the hardest thing you’ll strive to achieve in life because it all comes to this: We spent 5 days in our jobs and those days are about our routine and nothing else, then we find out that the weekend went so fast that we didn’t have the time to do all the things we wanted to do, ring you a bell somewhere?

    We will usually work only 8 hours per day and let’s say sleep another 8 hours(sleepy heads or the insomniac ones don´t count here) , so we get another 8 hours for living our lives, yes 8 hours more per day!!!  Of course some of that time will be spent on commuting to work and doing other needed stuff (like taking a shower, eating, etc) but I want to believe that we will have at least 4 hours remaining to do our stuff, and 4 hours times 5 is 20 hours! Which is like an extra weekend in between week!

    So each day has a little weekend of its own, each working day is a whole new adventure of the things we want to achieve! do you still want to let your five working days pass by you – without any impact – and in a constant wait for the weekends of your life? You can find time in weekdays to do many things, really think about your routine…

    When Monday comes, I say to myself: Well this is good! A new opportunity to start running the life that I want for myself! And I begin my countdown, I have five days to go, so many things to do until Friday I better hurry up!

    Please stop hating Mondays!

  • How passive can people be?

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    I actually doubted a lot when I started to write about this topic because I always try to find something in which I’m good at and hence advice about it. If I weren’t following my own advices in this blog, it would kind of weird to write about it, don’t you think? More directly, it would be wrong! , one can’t give advice on something that doesn’t know how it works!

    Well, let’s get to the topic or you may find me rambling about everything and nothing.

    Let’s start with this quote:

    “It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them, but went out and happened to things”

    Leonardo Da Vinci

    So the first time I read this, I said hell yes! That’s for sure! But then it got me thinking if I was really acting upon this. This is all about being active and passive; if you get another interpretation you can always write a comment to discuss it.

    So the people who stay passive and let things happen to them are not achievers? Well yes! Even for those who wait for lottery money, they have to go out there and buy the lottery ticket! And they just can’t expect to win the big prize without any ticket!

    This may be a post that makes references to my previous posts but it all comes to the same things: You have to go out there and make things happen! You have to act to achieve your goals!

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    Sadly, if you look around, I would dare to say that maybe 80 % or more of people that surround you are really passive, they would have a 9 to 5 job then go back to their homes, do some chores or routinely stuff and then get up the next day and start the same routine. These people are like an outbreak… are we going to let them absorb our beings?

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    We must go out there! Act upon our dreams, on the virtues we admire on others! Our life is a countdown, how much are we going to wait?

    So I actually found the solution and I hope that it will really help people out there who work in 9 to 5 jobs and desperately wait for the weekend to come, so keep in tune for my next blog! (Don’t worry it will come very soon, I decided to divide this blog so it won’t be too long !!!)

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  • Why daydreaming with open eyes is actually good…

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    I´ve always daydreamed with open ever eyes since I have a recollection of memory. If you don´t know what I´m talking about, maybe you should read this Wikipedia definition first: (just to be sure we´re on the same page)

    “Daydreaming is a short-term detachment from one’s immediate surroundings, during which a person’s contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake.”

    When I was younger I remember daydreaming while I was trying to “study” for school, maybe it was out of boredom or maybe I was trying to evade the “studying” aspect of that moment.

    I used to dream about what I was going to do when I grew older, how my life was going to be and how would things be that If I were different, if I were richer if I were prettier and others things (the “if I were prettier” dreams were a result of my poor self-esteem at that time but now I have another concept of beauty…). I used to spend a lot of time on this, of 3 hours of study I would spend half of it dreaming about everything and nothing…

    As time passed, I started to get stronger ideas of what I wanted to do with my life… do you think I stopped daydreaming? Not at all!, until now I still continue daydreaming all the time even when I´m at work….is it because I really have nothing better to do other than spending time imagining about the things that I would like to achieve or the type of life that I would like to have? Not really, actually I´m always struggling to find time for everything…

    It’s because of my nature, I´m a daydreamer by default but I´m proud of it because it actually keeps me in focus in the goals and dreams I want to achieve. If I weren’t frequently remembered by these dreams, I would probably let common life pass by me, forgetting my main ideals and where I´m heading for.

    From the perspective of loner, I don’t know if this really applies to “my type”, to my personality that tends to be more distant from people in general and perhaps more focused on my own objectives, but this is just a theory and maybe it would be nice to see your comments about this.. .

    BUT, there is an important BUT for the frequent daydreamers, your dreams have to have a little closure of their own, if you want these dreams to really happen, you have to snap out of them by thinking “now what do I have to do if I want to achieve that…” or “well let´s start doing X so one day I can be like in dream Y”… When you come back to reality, or stop dreaming, don´t let this wonderful time that you´ve just spend by go without rescuing encouraging motivations for you to continue life focusing on the direction of your dreams, always give them this little closures, they make you feel better, trust me and it´s a wonderful way to get you excited of the good things that are still to come in the future…

    Daydreaming lets you know that life should not be boring and that we shouldn’t accept regular routine, that there is so much out there that needs to be discovered.

    If you daydream, find the motivation for following these dreams and planning the actions that are needed to achieve them.

    Finally, a quote to remember:

    “All people dream but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake up in the morning to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they dream their dreams with open eyes and make them come true.”

    D. H. Lawrence

     

  • “You are the result of the five people that hang out with you the most”….WRONG!

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    I heard this phrase several times and I’m definitely sure that you heard it at least once, and I must be perfectly honest, the first time I heard it I thought to myself: “This is so true…” the phrase really got me and I remember even posting it in my Facebook Wall… I told myself that must be true! Of course people around you influence you a lot! The second time I heard the phrase, I actually thought a little bit more about it, deeply analyzed it and I came to these points:

    First, in my situation …being a loner … I couldn’t define my 5 people, it’s not that I’m an hermit, I have people around me or course, but only 3 came to my mind, and the after thinking that maybe person number 3 was not very close to me anymore, I got it sized to 2 people finally (between family and friends)…. But the number of people is not the point of the blog, so let’s continue…

    Before, let me tell you the story the prompt my analysis of this phrase, it’s a long story but I’ll summarize it as much as I can….

    –          One day I got a visit from a high school friend who I haven’t seen for more than a decade (please try not to guess my age…but yes I’m not that young) . After some little talk we found that we had a friend in common, well it was a work colleague for her but actually a good friend for me … she was actually very perplexed that I was her friend, actually like she couldn’t believe it…it was absolutely strange …she kept asking questions like “do you see her often ? really? how long have you two met you? Really that much?”…

    After the visit I told this story to person X and Y (the ones that I spend more time with). Person X said: “I think she was surprised that you had friends!” and person Y said “I think she doesn’t work with your friend and was just pretending” both opinions actually surprised me because Person X and Person Y perceive things very but VERY different from me.

    Do you know what my theory was about that friend? Well I thought that “Maybe this friend from school had some sort of conflict with my old friend and was surprised that I was her friend…I don’t know if this theory was true…we’d never know…

    Anyway, I realized that person X actually thinks so poor about my social skills and that person Y actually never understood the idea of the story. They perceive things SO different from me that I began to analyze how similar we were between the three, guess what? we were really different from each other and I may be actually the antagonist of person X and Y.

    After analyzing them very well, I found that:

    –          I love person X and Y but really don’t share the same values and beliefs. Every person must have its own values. You choose to believe and be honest to the values you’ve always had, just because your friends and family believe in other things, you are not going to change or to stop loving them right? You learn to accept them how they are, learn to live with them and YES! you remain faithful to yourself!

     

    –          I hang out with person X and Y a lot of time but we don´t share the same passion for the same things. Each person is unique and therefore each of us will eventually find what we love to do and what we are passionate about, that´s intrinsic of ourselves. Other people will come and go in our lives but we always need to pursue our OWN goals and our OWN dreams, not the ones of the people around us.

     

    –          It´s true that is better to be surrounded with people who are similar to you or like I read somewhere else…that have the same level of energy as you…but during our journey on this earth we´ve been given family and friends that are our beloved ones, but just because they don´t think like us, it doesn´t mean that we must let them go in search for others more alike, the true is that our personality and the way we forge it and the way we choose to direct our lives is JUST UP TO US and nobody else, so BE YOURSELF regardless of whom you are with! And cherish everybody around you because you can always learn things from everybody…

    What do you think? Are you really the sum of the five people around you or are you just YOU?

  • Don’t let criticism of your personal life get you! Remember the good things…

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    Criticism is hard to take sometimes. Sometimes we wish we didn’t hear it and sometimes we want to know it. In our careers, we like to be told what we are doing wrong so we can improve, but do we really want to hear the “we are doing something wrong” part?, I´ll leave this for another future blog.  But there is also another type of criticism, the one related to our personal lives. Loners will hear phrases like these ones:

    Why don’t you meet somebody? Why don’t you marry that somebody, have kids with that somebody and marry and live happily ever after?

    Well, it won’t necessary be in these words or in such a direct way, but some people will find ways to make us the same questions maybe in a more subtle way (But let´s face it, no matter how subtle they want to be, we always get it what they meant!).

    Criticism at our jobs or careers or whatever activity we do to receive criticism is different from the criticism we receive related to our personal lives and sometimes it gets us most because we receive them from close people (family and friends) (Although I met some people for five minutes and believe it or not they just popped out with those sort of questions, excuse me but mind their own business right?…)

    But however we take this personal criticism, remember to take into consideration these points:

    –          Who says that you have to follow a traditional pattern? Is there somewhere written that says that whatever the traditional society says is what you should do? Can anybody assure you that by doing what others do you will have happiness guaranteed?

     

    –          Do you really have to follow society traditions? Do you really want to be like everybody or you´d rather be unique? Maybe your way of living is destined to be different. Whenever someone makes judgments about your personal life, just think to yourself: “well I´m unique and maybe I can make my life more exciting this way” I´m not against of finding a partner or a significant other, but remember, just be with somebody if you feel it and want it not because people pushed you into that or you wanted to “merge” to society in some way. Remember, better alone than in bad company.

     

    –          Don’t ever question your own beliefs, society has formed certain preconceptions about how a person should develop his or her life, and every generation has done that. Many years ago society thought that women should only raise kids and stay at home, that was how society thought about how thinks should work at that time, do we still think the same? For the sake of goodness, I really hope that people out there don´t think like that anymore… But then if you see these changes in what society thought ages ago and nowadays, who guarantees that what our society thinks now is correct and is still going to work in the future? Maybe you are the future or you are ahead of your generation.

    Personal criticism of your life can sometimes really get you, but don´t let it. Try to remember all these things and just push yourself into your own goals and in living your life the best you can. Don´t get stuck in trying to fit a certain “mold”, don´t let this criticism affect who you are or change you. If you are a loner, then be a Happy One!

     

  • Being a loner actually gives more opportunities to focus on career goals?

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    I don’t know what you may think about this but I’m beginning to see that maybe this could be true…

    I’m a multi task person, I work in a company as technical writer, have a small business of my own and sometimes I happen to have small consultancies or “small jobs” on the way. Everything that seems interesting and that could give me an extra income is always welcomed. I have some bigger ideals and goals for the future… for instance I would like my business and my free lancing jobs to be big enough to make me an independent entrepreneur…. For the moment the economic situation is not that ideal…and that means that I have to maintain for a little longer my full time job … it’s not a bad job but I really don’t see myself spending years and years there….

    I’m more of a free spirit person and like many of you probably I would like to travel a lot around the world in the future but for that to come I have some financial issues to resolve before (like the money for traveling right?).

    So after all these ramblings I don’t want to bore you anymore and I want to summarize my thoughts in the following points, as encouragement for the people that are loners out there and don’t see that they may actually have an opportunity that others don’t have:

    • First, you can actually have more time to organize yourself; you keep worrying about your social life or “lack of”? So maybe you should gather your strengths to realize that you can actually take this “extra time” to see what are you going to do to improve your career opportunities, you always wanted to take that course about graphical design, creative writing, photography, marketing or something to improve your skills? What are you waiting?
    • You have a business idea but you have to do some market research or other type of research first to see if your idea actually has the chance to work? Use your extra time for this! Never complain about your lack of social life, see the positive side of this and see this as “good extra time for yourself”
    • You’ve been trying to change your career or want to start something new or just change of job? In this case I must tell you, some decisions are easier when you’re a loner, you don’t have actually to consult anybody else… or on the contrary, you can be sure that you won’t have that somebody else questioning about all your decisions, take the opportunity, if you are a loner, take the risks you always wanted to take, trust me this may be the best time for you to do that…
    • Finally, it may sound a little bit cold to say this, but being in a relationship, well depending of course the type of relationship (unless you have a perfect one), may actually make you lose the focus.  Difficult relationships where the circumstances make you worry or be afflicted all the time, may actually impact your career life. The relationship becomes your main worry in your life, and guess what; your career (well for most cases, not for everybody) becomes secondary and therefore doesn’t receive the attention that it should.
    • If you are a loner, take the advantage to focus all your energy on the things you always want to achieve, no difficult relationships torturing your head, just the pure and free spirit of pursuing your goals! So cheer up!

    What do you think? I hope this is helpful for all loners, I would like to hear your comments (not only from loners! )

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  • 10 reasons why loners should travel

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      1. They can choose where they always wanted to go without consulting somebody else…
      2. Hotels and other preferences depend only on the traveller …If you want to spend on a fancy hotel with all the commodities you always like it’s your money and nobody else can persuade you from the contrary. On the other hand, if you want to stay at a very budget accommodation because you’d rather indulge yourself in other travelling expenses
        (maybe good restaurants, or shopping) you can also do it! Nobody will tell you:  “ How come you choose this dump?”
      3. If you feel tired on your journey and you just want to stay and oversleep at the hotel until you feel you have the energy you need for your adventure, you can do it too! Nobody else will be bothering you about getting ready to go outside. Or, if you are and early bird and want to leave the hotel early and embark on your adventures first thing in the morning, you will have the chance to do it without insisting somebody else to hurry up.
      4. You feel hungry at 11 in the morning and you want to eat already because you’re starving and you need to gather your energies to continue your trip, guess what? You won’t have to agree with anybody else about going somewhere else before taking a break for food.  And on the contrary, you’d rather hit all the touristic crowded places first and no bother about breaks and food until you are done with them , you’ll have the chance to do it too, it’s after all just after you. You control when to eat and that believe me is such an advantage! since every one of us is different from one another and metabolism varies a huge deal between us travellers.
      5. Talking about food, you’d rather choose a very nice, indulging, relaxing and a little bit expensive restaurant over a fast food place? Don’t worry you’ll do as you want.
      6. You love going to outdoor spaces and parks rather than museums? Of you’d rather learn the culture by visiting all the museums of a city? It’s up to you; you’ll get to do as you wish because, you’re the master of your destiny in your trip.
      7. You’d rather walk than take the public transportation? Or maybe you want to be as efficient as possible, because time is money, and you’d rather spend on a taxi? I must tell you, nobody will argue with you about this, it will be all peace and tranquillity.
      8. You love shopping when you travel? You skip shopping because you’d rather spend time on other things when you travel? No more hard decisions and no more sacrificing your travelling time accompanying somebody else to shopping while you’d rather go elsewhere. Or maybe no more wandering around touristic attractions while you’d rather be shopping at those gorgeous shops you saw when you arrived.
      9. You want to book everything from hotels, tickets to attractions and everything else one year or six months in advance but you have to wait until the other person decides if he or she is going to travel with you or not. Usually by the time they decide all fares will have gone up to the sky.  Or maybe you don’t want to book anything in advance, perhaps you are free spirit and you want to let things happen when you arrive to the place… guess again? you will have the chance to do it! without any pressure from anybody…such a relief right?
      10. Finally, you want to spend the money you want and travel wherever and whenever you want and can? What are you waiting? It’s your money! You don’t need to get advice/agreement or even permission from somebody else!  Loners are so lucky when travelling is concerned…what are you waiting?

     

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